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Books for Living

Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality? For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life. In this delightful celebration of reading, Schwalbe invites us along on his quest for books that speak to the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions.

Crossing to Safety

One of the finest American authors of the 20th century, Wallace Stegner compiled an impressive collection of accolades during his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a National Book Award, and three O. Henry Awards. His final novel, Crossing to Safety is the quiet yet stirring tale of two couples that meet during the Great Depression and form a lifelong bond.

The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

An exquisite memoir about how to live - and love - every day with "death in the room", from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air.

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors.

A Man Called Ove

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon - the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell". But behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

An enchanting New York Times and international best seller and award-winner about life, art, literature, philosophy, culture, class, privilege, and power, seen through the eyes of a 54-year-old French concierge and a precocious but troubled 12-year-old girl.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

News of the World: A Novel

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

Commonwealth

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry: A Novel

Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is 77 years old and crazy, standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-men-who-want-to-talk-about-Jesus crazy. She is also Elsa's best and only friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother's stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.

Our Souls at Night: A Novel

In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf's inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife.

Anything Is Possible: A Novel

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times best seller) returns to visit her siblings after 17 years of absence.

Less

You are a failed novelist about to turn 50. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: Your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes - it would be too awkward - and you can't say no - it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. Question: How do you arrange to skip town? Answer: You accept them all.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk: A Novel

It's the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is about to take a walk. As she traverses a grittier Manhattan, a city anxious after an attack by a still-at-large subway vigilante, she encounters bartenders, bodega clerks, chauffeurs, security guards, bohemians, criminals, children, parents, and parents to be in surprising moments of generosity and grace. While she strolls Lillian recalls a long and eventful life that included a brief reign as the highest paid advertising woman in America - a career cut short by marriage, motherhood, divorce, and a breakdown.

Sourdough: A Novel

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her - feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.

Beartown

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semifinals, and they actually have a shot at winning.

Swimming Lessons

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides each in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter, she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. Twelve years after her disappearance, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window.

The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

Exit West: A Novel

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet - sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors - doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price.

New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline's world is forever changed when Hitler's army invades Poland in September 1939 - and then sets its sights on France. An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement.

My Father's Tears and Other Stories

This was the late John Updike's first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000. My Father's Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood, as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel. American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination.

My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir

When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: He wrote. The result is this stunning memoir. Featuring 78 poems and 78 essays, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine - growing up dirt poor on an Indian reservation, one of four children raised by alcoholic parents. Throughout, a portrait emerges of his mother as a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated woman.

Publisher's Summary

"What are you reading?"

That's the question Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, often in six months or less.

This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a "book club" that brings them together as her life comes to a close. Over the next two years, Will and Mary Anne carry on conversations that are both wide-ranging and deeply personal, prompted by an eclectic array of books and a shared passion for reading. Their list jumps from classic to popular, from poetry to mysteries, from fantastic to spiritual. The issues they discuss include questions of faith and courage as well as everyday topics such as expressing gratitude and learning to listen. Throughout, they are constantly reminded of the power of books to comfort us, astonish us, teach us, and tell us what we need to do with our lives and in the world. Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying.

Will and Mary Anne share their hopes and concerns with each other - and rediscover their lives - through their favorite books. When they read, they aren't a sick person and a well person, but a mother and a son taking a journey together. The result is a profoundly moving tale of loss that is also a joyful, and often humorous, celebration of life: Will's love letter to his mother, and theirs to the printed page.

What the Critics Say

"With a refreshing forthrightness, and an excellent list of books included, this is an astonishing, pertinent, and wonderfully welcome work." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

"A wonderful book about wonderful books and mothers and sons and the enduring braid between them. Like the printed volumes it celebrates, this story will stay with you long after the last page." (Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Time Keeper)

"Will Schwalbe's lyrical tribute to a life well-lived and a death graced with love and literature is a precious gift bestowed on all of us. What a unique and beautiful book this is, and how privileged we are to have it." (Sherwin B. Nuland, author of The Art of Aging and How We Die)

Would you consider the audio edition of The End of Your Life Book Club to be better than the print version?

N/A

What did you like best about this story?

The insights shared into who Mary Anne was, what she believed in, what she accomplished, how she chose to look at and live her life. Certainly this book is something most adults can benefit from by gaining more life insights from this remarkable woman's perspective.

Which character – as performed by Jeff Harding – was your favorite?

Mary Anne

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Not for me.

Any additional comments?

As someone who has experienced first hand a very similar experience watching my mothers final journey. I feel blessed and honored to be able to revisit that journey along with the author as he retells what this personal experience meant for him and his family. Not being a "everyone should" kind of person I still feel comfortable stating that there is plenty for everyone to touch and be touched by in this wonderful book.

HIghly recommend this for anyone who likes talking about books. I bought this book on sale because I really do like to know how people choose to read the books they read and what they think about them. However, I hated the title so much I hesitated for a long time because it sounded so morbid. Also, I thought it sounded like the author was marketing his book on the basis of his mother's cancer. In fact the book is a beautiful tribute to his mother and the discussions are exactly the kinds of things I like to know about other readers and what they read. But the title was quite a put-off.

I also wasn't wild about the narration because the narrator's voice did not seem to suit either of the main characters, Will Schwalbe or his mother, although his pace and pronunciation were very clear and would otherwise have been fine. He just sounded like a professional narrator rather than someone emotionally involved in either the books he read or the relationship with his mother. Also the narrator used a vocalization for a woman's voice to signal the mother's words that was unpleasant and priggish. I admit it's difficult to portray a 75 year old woman and her son in the same voice, but I think if a vocalization had to be used it could have been done in a less irritating manner.

That said, I had no trouble listening to the entire book which discusses many books I have read or planned to read, and some books I will try because I enjoyed the discussion of them in this book. The discussions were exceptionally interesting and on target and even the mother's illness which originally made me hesitant about reading this book ultimately gave the book meaning. However the title still seems like something written by a marketing person. But this is a very good book I highly recommend to enthusiastic readers.

This book dealt with a number of issues. It is the story of how a son and his mother deal with her terminal illness in a very loving, gentle, and respectful way. It is a story about the power of stories and books. And it is a story about a woman who chose to use the money and influence she had to make the world a better place, while keep a strong focus on her family who had great love and respect for her. It's a lovely and thoughtful book.

I've been through this with my mother - everyone's story is different - we didn't read books, for example. But I think it's important to look at end of life stories as a combination of happy and sad, and to know that while it's frightening, it is something you can get through. So the relevance.

Would you be willing to try another book from Will Schwalbe? Why or why not?

Would depend on the subject.

What does Jeff Harding bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I'm on the fence about him as narrator. I thought Mary Ann's voice was a bit falsetto.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The end.

Any additional comments?

I thought the book lacked emotion. As I said, we're all different, but I didn't get a sense of how he really felt. It was all very calm, clean, upper class white Protestant people (sorry, I don't mean to offend), and yet, this was a woman who spent a lot of time in refugee camps. I was looking for more feeling.

But, given that it was a book about books, I did think of reading some of these books.

A school administrator and avid reader and listener of books. At least an hour of every day is spent in the car, and that's where the bulk of my listening is done. I tend to listen to books on "faster" mode so I can get through more books!

There are no spoilers here. When a book is called "The end of your life book club," you know exactly what is going to happen in the end. Schwalbe walks you through about two years of his life as he and his mother discuss books during her cancer treatments and until her eventual death.

This book is touching--a son who loves his mother re-adjusts his life to be by her side for much of her ilness and a mother who inspired the love of reading not only in her own family, but it others around the world.

This book is a review of dozens of books out there waiting to be read. You may find yourself agreewith with Schwalbe's view of some books you've already written, while other books may be added to your reading list.

This book is inspiring. You will want to find purpose, grace and understanding like Schwalbe's mother, Mary Anne, displayed. If only the world were full of more people like her.

Would you consider the audio edition of The End of Your Life Book Club to be better than the print version?

I haven't read the print version, so I can't say.

What other book might you compare The End of Your Life Book Club to and why?

The Last Lecture by Randy PauschThe Books that Mattered by Frye Gaillard

Which scene was your favorite?

It's non-fiction, so there wasn't a "scene," but there were some funny incidents. One would be the dad's jokes in church. Another would be the loss of "turtle." A third would be when the mom took a deworming pill by accident and gave the dog a birth control pill.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

There were several nice moments. I enjoyed learning about some new books I'd never heard of (Strangers on a Train, Felicia's Journey, etc.) and will probably have to read. I also enjoyed the mom and son's relationship.

Any additional comments?

The author has recently released a follow-up of this book. I feel sure I'll read it, too.

I loved, not only the depth of story, but the review of books as they continued to read and share. The review of her life and actions and family was full of joy, resolve and honesty. Highly recommend to all who wish to take a step into relationship.

Exceptional story told by a son who shared the love of books with his mother.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

Yvonne

Little Mountain, Australia

4/8/13

Overall

"The End of Your LIfe Book Club"

This was an interesting read and informed the reader of a lot of good books to read. It was sensitive and sad, but also uplifting. See the way the family and mother dealt with her cancer was somehow hopeful.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

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